ANATOMY OF TORTURE — Historian Christopher Dietrich on the 100-year-long history of American torture; Jeffrey St. Clair on the implications of giving impunity to the CIA’s torturers; Chris Floyd on how the US has exported torture to its client states around the world. David Macaray on the Paradoxes of Police Unions; Louis Proyect on Slave Rebellions in the Open Seas; Paul Krassner on the Perils of Political Cartooning; Martha Rosenberg on the dangers of Livestock Shot-up with Antibiotics; and Lee Ballinger on Elvis, Race and the Poor South. Plus: Mike Whitney on Greece and the Eurozone and JoAnn Wypijewski on Media Lies that Killed.

Since the recession of 2008, it has become increasingly apparent that for the past four decades the majority of the American population has gotten a raw economic deal. Computer applications and internet technology have made accessible raw data from the Census, the Bureau ...

One of the most widely-advertised but falsest claims in American politics is that the modern Republican Party stands for “small government.”
In the distant past, leading Republicans were indeed sharp critics of statism. And even today a few marginal party activ...

Until recently, Americans could travel to Cuba as part of academic, religious or research groups. But according to travel writers for USA Today and other major newspapers, government approval for such trips has come to a halt. This is despite a program authorize...

Abortion was still illegal in 1970. At the time, as both an underground abortion referral service and a stand-up satirist, I faced an undefined paradox. Irreverence was my only sacred cow, yet I wouldn’t allow victims to become the target of my humor. There was one pa...

I have a friend who writes what he likes to refer to as “gay romance novels.” The novels are sufficiently sexually explicit, however, for some people to label them “gay porn.” I was surprised to learn that many of his readers were women. He met them, he explained,...

Methinks that if Lance Armstrong were innocent of charges he doped during the Tour de France, as he maintains, he wouldn’t avoid arbitration, where all the evidence, pro and con, could come out. He wouldn’t, without this forensic fight (where he could vindicate hims...

Recent revelations about Mitt Romney’s highly profitable company Bain Capital help connect the dots between offshore tax shelters, shady investors; and the role that ill-gotten gains plays in today’s casino-like finance capital.
Both the Los Angeles Times and H...

A decade ago, the British government of Labour prime minister Tony Blair decided to back President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq even though foreign office lawyers in London had warned that such an attack had no “legal basis in international law.”
...

I was not interested in Paul Ryan, the man about to be nominated by the Republican party for the office of Vice President, until the name Ayn Rand popped up.
Ayn Rand, it was said, was one of the main inspirations for his particular philosophy. Since Ryan is being ...

Ever since early April when he became an official candidate in the first post-revolution presidential election, Dr. Mohammad Morsi has been generally dismissed by most political observers as a weak and unimpressive politician. In fact, he was an accidental contender since...

Saying this gives me no pleasure, but it needs to be said. The 13 former confederate states now account for 144 seats in the Congress and 26 seats in the Senate. That’s a lot of government power for a group of constituents who, 150 years ago, hated the federal gover...

1 Rank of New Orleans in fastest growing US cities between 2010 and 2011. Source: Census Bureau.
1 Rank of New Orleans, Louisiana in world prison rate. Louisiana imprisons more of its people, per head, than any of the other 50 states. Louisiana rate is five t...

I was a staunch opponent of the death penalty, but in recent years I have had a change of mind on the issue. I now support the death penalty, but only for the privileged. This is not meant to be funny.
There are generally two arguments made in favor of the death pe...

Of the aristocratic and stylish six Mitford sisters, Jessica provides us with the Lazy Interpretation of Magna Carta beloved by sluggards everywhere. As a lovely communist (two of her sisters were fascists) she was disowned by her family and fell from the social peaks o...

The fourth-year national election cycle has a way of bringing out the worst and the best of political escapades, but it is the worst capers, like Rep. Todd Akin’s (R. MO) ridiculous “legitimate rape” statement that rings the public’s bell. Where does stuff like th...

Three years ago, U.S. vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan published a short theoretical essay called ‘The Cause of Freedom cannot be separated from the Cause of Life’.[1] There are several reasons...

People stop in Victorville California 85 miles northeast of Los Angeles because they have to see someone at one of its several prisons (federal, state, county and city) or have prison-related business, or because they’re hot and tired coming back from Las Vegas to Los A...

We cannot remedy the large racial achievement gaps in American education if we continue to close our eyes to the continued racial segregation of schools, owing primarily to the continued segregation of our neighborhoods. We pretend that this segregation is nobody’s ...

Mumia Abu-Jamal, the internationally recognized American political prisoner, thwarted a Philadelphia judge’s secretive court order that could have eliminated his future appeal rights when he filed a last- minute motion on August 23rd challenging that order sentencing hi...